-Caveat Lector-
Last post (from me) on this issue)
>From Nat'l Review
> The End Of Courage
>
> The strange death of an old virtue.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> -- ROGER SCRUTON
>
> Mr. Scruton is a writer and philosopher in England and the author of
> An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
>
>
>
> ONE of the lessons to be drawn from the conflict in Kosovo is that,
> while our governments are ready to use military force, they are
> reluctant to take the risk of fighting. The strategy adopted is
> essentially one of window dressing. "Look how strong we are!" NATO
> declares; "we can destroy factories, bridges -- whole towns, if we
> desire!" The Serbs know that the cost of rebuilding those factories,
> bridges, and towns will be borne, in the end, by the states that are
> currently destroying them. What matters, to them, is the war on the
> ground, in which men face each other and fight -- as the Kosovo
> Liberation Army would fight, if we had the sense to arm it. Killing,
> intimidating, and driving into exile are the real business of war: and
> on this level, everything has proceeded, from the Serb point of view,
> as smoothly as could ever be expected.
>
> <Picture>What explains the reluctance of NATO to fight? Some speak of
> the enormous monetary cost of mobilizing troops on the ground. But it
> is a cost that Europe and America, controllers of the world's wealth,
> could easily meet. Besides, it would be far less than the cost of
> repairing the damage caused by continual bombing and of housing the
> Kosovan refugees. Others refer to the inevitable casualties, and the
> reluctance of Western democracies to accept them. But this is a
> doubtful argument. In Britain, at least, public opinion is behind the
> use of force, and eager for a speedy and definitive end to the
> conflict. Our airmen are already expressing their frustration at rules
> of engagement that prevent them from making use of their low-flying
> skills, and from taking the risk of direct air-to-ground combat.
>
> <Picture>The history of modern warfare tells us that, in the end, the
> swiftest resolution to a conflict, and the one most economical in both
> military and civilian casualties, is the decisive victory on the
> ground -- the breakthrough that leads to the capture of disputed
> territory. That victory could be achieved tomorrow, to the immense
> relief not only of the Kosovan Albanians but of the nations that have
> been half-reluctantly persuaded to defend them. In some peculiar,
> metaphysical way, however, the hands of our governments are tied. It
> is as though all options were open, provided nothing were at risk
> besides machines. The crucial factor on which victory has always
> depended -- the willingness to risk life and limb -- has been removed
> from the equation.
>
> <Picture>In effect, the war in Serbia is an exercise in sanitized
> aggression -- force without the risk of force, violence without tears,
> destruction from a place of safety. Not only is this cowardly: It is
> profoundly counter-productive, as we are beginning to see. Courage is
> a higher value than safety, and a life without risk diminishes the
> gift of freedom. And part of the value of courage over hesitation lies
> in the fact that it moves more decisively, more economically, and with
> less catastrophic destruction, to its goal. Courage is not just
> intrinsically admirable; it is also the most efficient means to
> achieve what we want.
>
> <Picture>If we wish to understand the mentality of our leaders, we
> must remind ourselves of the liberal priorities in politics. The
> Founding Fathers believed that the purpose of politics is to safeguard
> the space in which individuals can grow. The Constitution was devised
> to promote freedom and enterprise, and to encourage individuals to
> take full responsibility for their lives. The liberal heirs of the
> Founding Fathers believe that the purpose of politics is to look after
> all citizens from cradle to grave, regardless of what they have done
> to deserve it. For them, politics is a rescue service, offered
> unconditionally to all. Hence safety, health, and comfort become the
> primary political values. The aim is to create a risk-free society. If
> we contemplate war, it is only war at a distance, a series of "warning
> shots" that will deter the villains from their purpose without
> exposing our citizens to risk. Such a war, however, is both costly and
> essentially unwinnable.
>
> <Picture>It is not only in war that the liberal priorities are
> dangerous. The obsession with health is profoundly unhealthy, and the
> pursuit of safety unsafe. If we believe that the state is there to
> cushion us from misfortune, to compensate every loss and make up for
> every suffering, then we automatically relinquish control over our
> lives, while drastically narrowing the sphere of human action.
> Regulations of a mind-numbing complexity now govern activities,
> consumer products, and employment, with the aim of ensuring that the
> citizen can amble through a risk-free world, picking his pleasures
> from shelves loaded with packaged and sanitized products, waddling
> onwards in a state of moral obesity. As a result, the citizen lives
> longer than he might. But his life is less completely his own. We have
> suffered an enormous diminution in the value of human existence,
> because we have removed risk from the heart of it. It is only by
> staking your life, that you fully possess it.
>
> AN EXAMPLE OF CONFIDENCE
> <Picture>It is worth harking back to the great days of the Empire,
> when the British exuded such confidence in their laws and customs. A
> robust sense of adventure, and a delight in the world, radiates from
> all that the British then did. Of course they were arrogant. But
> whatever contempt they showed toward other peoples was tempered by a
> sense of justice and fair play. They acknowledged our universal
> equality in the eyes of God, and regarded their own nationality as a
> stroke of good fortune that brought with it a corresponding duty to
> govern wisely and well. We laugh at this now; but not without a sense
> of regret, and with an inner recognition that theirs was a healthier
> and a happier world than ours.
>
> <Picture>The British rejoiced in an unparalleled sense of safety --
> they were at home in the world, and entitled to enjoy it. This
> self-confidence can be witnessed in all the great buildings --
> government offices, cathedrals, parish churches, colonial mansions --
> that they spread over the surface of the globe; it can be read in
> their colonial literature, and heard in their repertoire of rousing
> hymns. Yet, paradoxically, their sense of safety existed only because
> they courted danger. They took risks, and were fortified by overcoming
> them; they ventured into disease-ridden and fear-haunted places, to
> emerge after their ordeal with shy self-satisfaction, quietly resuming
> their place beside the hearth. Home was safe, because they fought for
> it and died for it. General Gordon of Khartoum was portrayed, in the
> picture that took pride of place in so many schoolrooms, as facing the
> spears of savages with a calm acceptance of his fate, as safe and
> unflustered in death as he would have been on the thickly carpeted
> stairway of his London club.
>
> <Picture>Of course, this attitude was fortified by myth, and depended
> upon constant rehearsal. The entire education of the English was
> devoted to instilling the attitudes that suited them for those
> adventures overseas -- adventures both profitable and mad. But the
> resulting state of mind was not a myth -- on the contrary, it was a
> real achievement, and one that, in our century, the Americans too have
> emulated. By courting danger, you make yourself safe -- not safe in
> fact (14 million British bodies lie buried far from home) -- but safe
> in your heart. Since death is inevitable, there is no other form of
> safety that really matters to us. The citizen of the liberal state,
> surrounded on all sides by his protectors and encouraged to avoid
> every risk that might shorten his life, does not achieve the sense of
> safety that the British then achieved. On the contrary: The more
> shielded he is from risk, the more terrible does his death appear to
> him. Anxieties about health fill his waking moments, and his long last
> years -- when work is over and there is no life of adventure to look
> back upon -- are ones of disappointment, fear, and boredom.
>
> <Picture>Once health and safety are guaranteed by the state, we begin
> to see them not as gifts of fortune but as rights. No one has a right
> to take them from us, and should they be taken in any case we think of
> ourselves as wronged. This attitude is now so widespread in America as
> to form the primary subject-matter of litigation. If you fall down and
> hurt yourself, your first instinct is to look round for someone to
> sue. If you smoke yourself to death, your survivors claim millions of
> dollars from the tobacco companies. If you die on the operating table,
> the doctor who tried to save you foots the bill. In a world where
> health is a right, death becomes a wrong.
>
> <Picture>To say that this attitude is unhealthy is to identify only
> the smallest part of what is bad about it. Death is not just
> inevitable: It is the root of our condition. A life in which death is
> put out of mind, but confronted when necessary with courage and honor,
> is the only life that accords with human dignity. "A free man," wrote
> Spinoza, "thinks of nothing less than of death." He meant not that we
> should look on death with lordly indifference, but that we should not
> look on it at all -- and above all that we should not devote our
> waking thoughts to the absurd endeavor of postponing it. To live
> properly is to accept that we shall die. For without this fact nothing
> would have meaning for us -- death and suffering are the occasions of
> human virtue. Compassion, courage, sacrifice, all are predicated on
> our mortality. By cultivating these virtues we overcome the fear of
> death; we also prepare ourselves for emergencies. We throw off our
> moral obesity, and become useful both to others and to ourselves.
>
> <Picture>Which brings me back to the war in Kosovo. In any real
> emergency, it is the courageous person who sees us through, just as it
> is the risk-taker who makes an economy work. In a limited war, like
> that in Kosovo, we can rely on technology and expertise. But, when the
> going gets tough, there is only one thing that can guarantee our
> survival, and that is the bravery of those who are locked in combat.
> Just as the risk-free economy destroys the enterprise on which it
> depends, so does risk-free warfare sap the courage needed for warfare.
> Indeed, there is no greater threat to safety than the obsession with
> safety.
>
> <Picture>I have no doubt that our soldiers and airmen are willing to
> take risks. For the liberal rot has not yet destroyed military
> institutions. The military, however, are schooled in another ethos
> than the politicians who command them; and when the commander in chief
> is a president whose only experience of war is to avoid being called
> upon to fight in it, then the liberal mindset takes center stage. That
> is what we are witnessing in Kosovo; and the sad thing is that there
> will not be fewer deaths and less suffering as a result of this
> hampered strategy, but more deaths and more suffering, precisely
> because the time for decisive action has been so unconscionably
> postponed.
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
>
>
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